Save UK Justice… the jigsaw!

I’ve not totally lost it, by the way – I’m working out how to embed certain interactive objects into a WordPress.com site. Main reason being I wanted to see if it was possible because when you look through the WP help forums they say you can’t do it – the standard reply to questions about embedding interactive or more exotic objects is that you can’t add them due to WP.com (as opposed to self-hosted WP.org) being a shared (with other users) platform and things like flash and javascript in posts would present security risks. Pah

Anyway, they’re wrong, it can be done. You just need to transform the embed code that you would pick up from elsewhere – by re-forming the ’embed this into your website’ code – into an appropriate shortcode. I did a bit of digging and found this excellent workthrough. Basically, it’s just about pulling the bits you don’t need out of the embed code and reforming the bit of code you’re left with into a shortcode that works in WP

I’ll use the jigsaw I did above as an example

An example

First off, find what you want to embed. I used http://jigsawsite.com/ (credit to Panos who wrote the blog I’ve linked to above) and selected the option to make a jigsaw from a URL – providing it with the URL to the image I used in the earlier Save UK Justice post I did

Once you’re happy with how many pieces you want in your jigsaw, select the code from the “Embed puzzle directly on your blog or website” and stick it in a text editor. I just used TextEdit on my Mac, but anything you can edit text in will do

This is what you get (using my example – the jigsaw at the top of this post):

However, all we want from this is this bit beginning with “FlashVars” and including the ‘.swf’ link – highlighted:

So, just get rid of absolutely everything else so all you have left is that bit of code. Then, paste it where indicated in this little downloadable PDF – you’ll have to pull it out of the PDF and paste it into your text editor to play with it. I had to do this as I can’t paste source code directly into a post on WP! That’ll have to be another post I guess…

Once done, paste what you’re left with onto a line of its own in your blog draft, but make sure you are viewing/writing your draft in “Text”, not “Visual” when you paste it – look to the top right of your drafting area and you’ll see the two little tabs (or top right if you’re writing in Distraction Free mode). You can switch between them mid-draft so don’t worry, just click the “Text” tab, paste the code, and click back to “Visual” if you like

And that’s it. Voila!

You can use this same method in your sidebars too, not just in posts. When I get a minute I’ll insert a flash chess game into my sidebar so when you get bored reading my blogs you can have a quick game of chess against the computer instead 🙂

One final thing!

Please sign the petition to save UK justice. As I write this blog, it stands at over 83,000 signatures but needs 100,000 to be considered for a debate in Parliament. We need to see what they do when they’re put in this position and have to make a decision on whether to hold a debate. My personal feeling is that the government will try to avoid it at all costs. However, let’s put it on the line regardless and see just how interested in ‘transparency’ and ‘justice’ this government really is. Let’s see if they’ll allow the wider public to be able to put all the pieces together for themselves